Search Results
Report
Barriers to household risk management: evidence from India
Financial engineering offers the potential to significantly reduce the consumption fluctuations faced by individuals, households, and firms. Yet much of this potential remains unfulfilled. This paper studies the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate low-income Indian farmers in the event of insufficient rainfall during the primary monsoon season. We first document relatively low adoption of this new risk management product: Only 5-10 percent of households purchase the insurance, even though they overwhelmingly cite rainfall variability as their most ...
Report
Trading activity in the Indian government bond market
We study how the Indian government bond market functions, how it has changed over time, and what factors help explain some of its features. Looking at the primary market, we describe how underwriting obligations are allocated to primary dealers via auction and identify several significant determinants of the underwriting commission cutoff rate, including the launch of the Negotiated Dealing System-Order Matching System (NDS-OM) electronic trading platform. Turning to the secondary market, we explore the importance of benchmark bonds, the launch of NDS-OM, the growth in trading activity, and ...
Conference Paper
Strategies for growth : general discussion
Journal Article
World Population: What Helps Explain the Explosion?
A steep decline in India’s death rate from 1950 to 2019 substantially affected the size of the global population and reduced that nation’s median age relative to the U.S.
Working Paper
Why are Manufacturing Plants Smaller in Developing Countries? Theory and Evidence from India
Poorer countries (and poorer states within India) have a larger share of manufacturing employment in small plants. This paper presents empirical evidence and a theoretical model to show that this relationship is driven by greater demand for lower quality goods in poorer regions, which can be produced efficiently in small plants. First, using data for India, we show that richer households buy higher price goods and larger plants produce higher price products. Second, we develop a model that matches these facts. Finally, we find that our model explains about forty percent of the cross-state ...
Briefing
Did U.S. Immigration Policy Influence India’s IT Boom?
We highlight an unintended consequence of U.S. immigration policy for high-skill workers. Indian college students and workers got skills in computer science in the 1990s — a key occupation for innovation and growth — with the prospects of migrating to work in the booming U.S. IT industry. However, many ended up not migrating or returning to India after a short period. These workers helped build the IT sector in India, which grew at outstanding rates in the late 2000s.
Working Paper
The IT Boom and Other Unintended Consequences of Chasing the American Dream
We study how US immigration policy and the Internet boom affected not just the US, but also led to a tech boom in India. Students and workers in India acquired computer science skills to join the rapidly growing US IT industry. As the number of US visas was capped, many remained in India, enabling the growth of an Indian IT sector that eventually surpassed the US in IT exports. We leverage variation in immigration quotas and US demand for migrants to show that India experienced a 'brain gain' when the probability of migrating to the US was higher. Using detailed data on higher education, ...
Journal Article
Interview: Raghuram Rajan
In August 2005, at the annual conference of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Raghuram Rajan created a stir. Rajan, then chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, argued in a presentation that a hidden danger of massive failures was lurking in the global financial system. Risks had been building up, he said, a result of the incentives facing private institutions in the environment of that era.
Journal Article
Asian nations driving world oil prices
The rapid growth in China and India has led to an increase in demand for oil, which, in turn, has driven up prices. After adjusting for inflation, a barrel of oil today costs about what it did during the 1979 oil shock.